Search Results for: Mary Johnson

Vice has released devastating documents about the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI’s analysis of a “threat” released by the Baltimore Police to the media on April 27 that local “gangs” had gotten together and conspired to “take out cops.” The “credible threat,” used to justify an aggressive crackdown on protests against police violence, was reported on at the time from everyone from local news to national outlets like CBS News

As much ink as has been spilled by corporate media pearl-clutching the “threat of the ISIS propaganda machine,” what’s never mentioned is that by sheer reach, the vast majority of ISIS propaganda is disseminated by corporate media themselves.

A flier advocating a “purge”—a term based on the 2013 dystopian film The Purge, supposedly signifying an outbreak of lawlessness—was, according to the Baltimore Sun, “widely circulated” among the students. But the evidence of this purge spreading on social media is murky at best.

The Washington Post calls Freddie Gray “the nation’s most prominent symbol of distrust in police.” The Post can’t call him a symbol of police violence, because as far as the paper is concerned, there’s no way to tell whether any police violence occurred at all.

Western media keep breaking the same story of Russia’s paid Internet trolls over and over again. In all these stories, however, the rather glaring fact that the US has a long-documented history of manipulating social media is not mentioned once.